community fibre - fast or slow - pros or cons

apart from speed / cost is there any other benefit from going for the faster service?


community fibre

1 Gbps Fibre Broadband for 24 months: £25/month. £27/month after the initial contract term of 24 months

150 Mbps Fibre Broadband for 24 months: £20/month, £22/month after the initial contract term of 24 months

Essential Package:
20 Mbs Fibre Broadband for 12 months: £12.50/month and then at the prevailing new customer rate thereafter.
(Essential Package will be excluded from any discretionary Consumer Price Index (CPI)* plus 2.9% monthly price increases that may be applied to other Community Fibre packages.)

I'm on vodafone 80/20 fttc @ £35/m (crept up from £22/m over the years)
Calls are made from mobile (ID Mobile) and incoming landline kept for legacy reasons (eg receiving calls from elderly relatives - voip service would be needed).

cf info from 'the legal stuff'

Edited by CheapSkate (Mon 26-Jun-23 16:47:15)

Unless you're a big downloader, I don't think the raw speed is an issue.

Things that might be a factor would be if you think the latency on the faster link is better (don't know the evidence for this) and whether speed variability means that you're more likely to hit your needed numbers at busy times... (dunno).

Another factor would be what router you get - the faster link will probably come with a better router which might have better wifi or meshing capability - IMHO it's my WiFi experience around my house that has biggest impact on usability/experience rather than the peak speed I can get when hotwired into the fiber termination.

Hope this helps

Jim

150Mbps isn't a game changing improvement from a decent FTTC service, though most houses would struggle to utilise 1Gbps as well. It's a shame there's no 500Mbps option as that's generally a good sweet spot between price and a speed that you can also hit over a wireless connection.

With only £5 difference between 150Mbps and 1Gbps having anything in between seems a little pointless - with the cost model it would just make their offerings more complex.

True, I hadn't spotted how close together the pricing was. It's clearly designed to make 1Gbps the default choice and the 3Gbps as the premium offering.

You may not notice much difference between 150 Mbps and 1Gbps if you only browse the web and/or only stream a few TV channels at the same time. You might notice a difference if you download large files,

Fibre services (FTTP) are generally more reliable than services that use metal phone lines. They can suffer from contention so speed tests to this website may not reach the max possible speed which for a 1Gbps service is about 940Mbps due to overheads.

In reply to a post by JimInCam:

Another factor would be what router you get - the faster link will probably come with a better router which might have better wifi or meshing capability - IMHO it's my WiFi experience around my house that has biggest impact on usability/experience rather than the peak speed I can get when hotwired into the fiber termination.

Hope this helps

Jim

With Community Fibre it appears that recently they decided to offer the same Linksys Velop MX4200 Tri-Band Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System (AX4200) on all packages from lower tier to the 1Gbps.

The only better router you get is with the 3Gbps Technicolor WiFi 6 that has 4 LAN ports and better specs.

But most users will have Linksys Velop MX4200 router. I have not joined Community Fibre yet. The router comes with 3 LAN ports. So if you need to connect more devices you will need to buy a network switch, which obviously can be a con.

Or your devices must be upgraded to ones that support WiFI. For example I have an old Technomate TM 5402 satellite TV receiver that has only LAN port capability and no WiFi in built. I upgraded to an Octagon SF8008 satellite receiver a couple of weeks ago that supports WiFi so that way when I upgrade to Community Fibre I won't be hampered by the lack of 1 LAN port.

Even though I could use another router as a dummy switch or buy a switch, I'd prefer not to have to do that.

Unless things have changed, I believe the main difference other than speed is that only tiers 500mbps or higher are not subject to CGNAT. Which may or may not make a difference for you depending on your use cases.
If you need a publicly accessible/routable IP address, go for 1gbps.

I'm rather impatiently waiting for Community Fibre to come to my area myself so I can finally jump ship from Virgin!

In reply to a post by jpm:

150Mbps isn't a game changing improvement from a decent FTTC service, though most houses would struggle to utilise 1Gbps as well. It's a shame there's no 500Mbps option as that's generally a good sweet spot between price and a speed that you can also hit over a wireless connection.

I'm on 300/50 via Openreach FTTP, and it's plenty good enough. If I had the option of 150/150 symmetric for the same price, I'd take that instead.

Download speeds are not an issue: it takes about a minute to download a full macOS update, for example, but it still takes 20 minutes to install.

In short, if you don't find your current FTTC 80/20 is limiting what you're doing, then you'll almost certainly be very happy with 150, and not notice the difference for anything faster.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Download speeds are not an issue: it takes about a minute to download a full macOS update, for example, but it still takes 20 minutes to install.

Similar here, even with a 1/3rd of your download speed a TomTom update takes longer to load on devise than download to pute.

I think it was this CGNAT business was I was concerned about:

In reply to a post by Jonny4911:

Unless things have changed, I believe the main difference other than speed is that only tiers 500mbps or higher are not subject to CGNAT. Which may or may not make a difference for you depending on your use cases.
If you need a publicly accessible/routable IP address, go for 1gbps.

I'm exploring options as my vodafone adsl/fttc 80/20 cost is £35/m + payg calls. Could I get better for less cost?
Would going for the lowest cost option be creating potential future problems ?

I can get 150Mbps @ £18 (£20 after 2yrs)* or take 1Gps @ £25/m - I would also need to get a voip service for the landline number.

I'm using an old zyxel amg1302 as a wifi extender as the existing thg3000g cannot cover the whole premises and does not allow channel selection. The zyxel gives better coverage than the THG, and allows 2g4 channel selection.no 5g.
There are very strong signals from neighbours on both sides (same SSID names on NetSpot)

Changeing from adsl(20/1) to ftcc(80/20) made no difference with downloads but very noticeable on uploading (made online cloud services useable and useful)

I'm not averse to buying more kit (will need to for voip) but don't want to be overpaying for something that may never get used. I suspect that the prices for the slower services will rise at a more rapid rate than for the fast.


*via moneysupermarket

In reply to a post by Jonny4911:

Unless things have changed, I believe the main difference other than speed is that only tiers 500mbps or higher are not subject to CGNAT. ....

Things have changed, (since end of June?)


"home broadband services below 3000Mbps speed we use Carrier Grade Nat (CGN) technology to make efficient use of IPv4 addresses. Port forwarding is not possible through CGN"

(from The Legal Stuff 3.11)

In reply to a post by jpm:

150Mbps isn't a game changing improvement from a decent FTTC service, though most houses would struggle to utilise 1Gbps as well. It's a shame there's no 500Mbps option as that's generally a good sweet spot between price and a speed that you can also hit over a wireless connection.

Looks like Community Fibre have offered a 500Mbps package via a Uswitch deal. https://communityfibre.co.uk/500mbps-24-months-uswitch
The problem is that this deal overall isn't as attractive as the 1Gbps option due to the fact that while the price may be only £23 (£2 cheaper than the 1Gbps) you're only getting £60 Amazon voucher vs the £120 + free set up fee for the 1Gbps service.
Here you have to pay £9.95 set up fee, so overall you're losing more than with the 1Gbps package!

I don't understand how the 500Mbps Uswitch deal can be more expensive overall than the 1Gbps. But whoever chose this plan, will be at loss. Everyone should carefully calculate the overall deal with the vouchers/setup fee before choosing a package. As £25 per month 1Gbps overall becomes cheaper than this 500Mbps package for £23 a month.

Is their service available to you? Wasn't in my area when I checked.

Vodafone's price hike seems to be pretty standard and assume follows energy and most other things now. Wouldn't be so bad if they actually read what is sent to them.

Community Fibre branded Linksys Velop MX4200 routers can be bought pretty cheaply on ebay, (They were half this price on ebay not so long ago!)

hTTps://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=com...

I have the original plus 2 from ebay which form a pretty solid mesh in my house.

Edited by Rahosi (Thu 20-Jul-23 17:02:40)

Thanks for your reply, Rahosi.
I note that you even responded to my thread a few months ago regarding the router.
https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/otherisp/t/4730328...
Now this is no longer a headache of mine as I know that the router is with 3 ports with all packages.
I have upgraded my TV satellite receiver with a new one (Octagon SF8008) that supports WiFi so I won't be dependent on a router with 4 ports or need network switch. Though I'm still testing to see performance of WiFi vs LAN. Hopefully there wouldn't be too big of a deal.

Although, you're right you can buy now the router for cheap on Ebay. I personally would buy something even better like the 5300 MX instead.

Also, I think it isn't wise to buy used routers because you never know, some of them may be faulty like losing power/connection. I remember how I destroyed my Plusnet ADSL router accidentally when my Microwave was sitting next to the router, probably radio waves killed the router. The router stopped working and was being rebooted on its own every few days. But it wasn't a problem because towards the end of my contract 3 years ago I joined TalkTalk FTTC at that time so knew I'll have a new router.

Too many faulty products are sold on Ebay by individual sellers. But now since this particular router is supplied with all packages it isn't really a concern. I always like to connect devices as much as possible with LAN cable. But obviously if I have no choice then WiFi is my last resort like in the case of the TV Sat Receiver.

In reply to a post by Rahosi:

Community Fibre branded Linksys Velop MX4200 routers can be bought pretty cheaply on ebay,

I know it is not an issue for the buyer exactly but does the seller have the right to sell that equipment? Surely it is not old enough to be out of contract already?

Does the provider even care?